Match Report
Sunday 18 July -v- New Ash Green at Punch Croft
Our first ever trip to New Ash Green coincided with their club BBQ, but owing to the non-appearance of DT at the Queens Head the bulk of the side failed to manage the early start. The unruly presence of Darkie, Rhino and Lardy, stuffing their faces with burgers and giving our oppo some general abuse, pointed to a sure fire cert that this would be our only visit. After the usual toss fiasco, we found ourselves asked to field, on a ground that was both large and fast running. Rhino opened in tandem with Softy and that much sought after early breakthrough was achieved when Spud snapped up his elusive 200th catch, via a juggle from Neil Clark’s gloves, at slip. From then on it became a struggle to keep the scoring to a minimum. Sumo eventually arrived, as late replacement to ‘132’, but even his considerable bulk did little to plug the open spaces that NAG was exploiting. Lardy conjured the second wicket, with a sharp return catch and continued in an eleven over spell that deserved greater reward. Slack apparently thought he was involved in some Test Match or other, and felt the need to spray wides and no balls all over the place, as if NAG needed any further assistance. With his normal impeccable timing, Nobby turned his arm to great effect, removing the free-scoring opener and adding a second victim courtesy of a good catch from Timmo. All in all we toiled away and kept our fielding tidy, enabling us to restrict the target to one under the two hundred. With ever darkening skies it was always likely that the weather would be the only winner, but Darkie and Timmo gave the oppo every indication that we had the fire power to overhaul the target. Slack cruised nonchalantly through the three thousand run mark, on his way to an unbeaten 63, which included ten boundaries. After Darkie’s dismissal, we had our usual mini-collapse, but when rain finally stopped play for good, GT’s efforts had put us in a strong enough position to go on to win the match. We made up for our earlier non-appearance by out-lasting the majority of oppo and partaking in performance jugs from Softy and The Nob.
